all. good. things. life sorta hammered a few things out this past month. maybe I hammered them out. either way, let’s fucking go. whatever it was/is … it’s gonna be a wild three months.
what’s “home”? for me, it started in a cabin in Alaska. after 40+ years, my parents just sold it.
but home isn’t walls or land—it’s love, adventure, and the people who make you feel alive.
Mom, Dad, you made Alaska my very first home and my most prized place to wander. for that, and much more, i love you both so damn much. life here wasn’t always perfect, but it was an adventure.
you built a whole world from this cabin and have given @tealmcallister and me an incredible journey of a life. you should feel so damn proud of that.
This gnarly city has handed my ass to me a few times, but it also handed me Claudine Ko.
I was instantly enamored. She was brilliant, articulate and precise when she spoke.
At first, Claudine just seemed another New Yorker with great style and a clear point of view.
What I didn’t know, and I would eventually learn, was that she was/is a trailblazing Asian-American journalist, who, along with a cohort of incredibly potent and bright-minded, first-generation folks with Asian roots, unknowingly redefined what it meant to live in a country that had, for a time, tried to erase or undermine many of her (and their) forbears.
In the 90s and early 2000s, Claudine didn’t know how important her work on a fledging, bi-monthly Asian-focused culture magazine called Giant Robot was. The way she even recalls it, she didn’t much think it was that culturally critical. She simply wanted to tell stories that no one had told before.
Last night, at New York City’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, Claudine sat on a panel discussion for the now-out-of-print publication’s official book launch.
I heard her answer questions with @giantrobot founder Eric Nakamura. At one point Eric complimented Claudine on her photography skills, expressing envy over her mastery of a craft he’d so badly wanted to master. She was taken aback; surprised that he’d felt that way.
That’s the thing about Claudine. She always seems genuinely surprised when you tell her you think she does something well. But it’s not because she doesn’t believe in herself, it’s more so that she just wants to get on with the adventure.
On stage, in spite of her adeptness at articulating herself, when she has a microphone in her hand, the volume of her voice lowers a few decibels. She’s not easy in the spotlight. She doesn’t want to be the story. And perhaps that’s the mark of a true journalist. And it’s even the better mark of a dear friend who’s always willing to help you clearly understand your own story.
I’m infinitely proud to call her my friend and I imagine there’s a whole world that is more proud of who they are because she helped them see themselves more clearly.
And, she signed my copy of the book!
nearly a decade ago i arrived in Fire Island Pines as a stranger. we all do the first time. but soon the faces we don’t know become the hosts we’ll never forget.
over dinners, beach walks and dance parties we became — and embraced — the sissies we for so long were terrified of being.
we made mistakes here. we watched the sun rise, drunk and high out of our curious and carefree minds. we fell in love during one simple, 20-minute conversation with the most beautiful man we were sure couldn’t possibly exist. but there he was.
each time we come here we leave parts of our being in the white sand along the Atlantic’s shore, among the trees, along the boardwalks and on the dance floor at High Tea (ok, fellas, just make the joke).
our laughter and tears forge the essence of struggle and triumph of a place that was built with the intention of at least trying to ensure we’d all one day have a place to belong. by many accounts that aspiration is a work in progress, but it seems to be getting better every season.
each year on July 4th, drag queens stand at the ferry dock and serenade throngs of onlookers to “The Star Spangled Banner.” it’s poetic that in this place, with the harsh political reality around us, our nation’s anthem takes on an ever-so-nuanced set of meanings. every lyric from the drag queen’s mouth a critical reminder that, somewhere, there’s a frontier to point ourselves toward and something absolutely worth fighting to save.
sometimes we sit in silence. sometimes we talk about the life we’ve shared for many decades. always, @manningkylie paints.
she paints limbs and the folds of body and tissue as though they’re faces. these are the parts of her work where my mind gets a purchase on who the subject might be. it’s never the actual faces, for she abstracts them.
she’s even told me that many of the faces she sees in her daily life are too pretty and vivid for the worlds of her works. instead, it’s a calf slightly flexed. it’s a sinewy tricep stretched forward. that’s where she lays each subject’s unmistakable DNA. she helps us to see beauty in ourselves, when we’ve spent a life presuming — and coming to terms with the fact that — we’ll never convey the beauty we hope to.
in a world enamored with AI and the perfect face, it feels like an ever so timely flex to suggest that a visage is only part of the way each and every one of us visually imprints on the world around us.
